During this Easter week-end, I’m at the breakpoint demo-party with the good people of Calodox. I’m not presenting anything, just fiddling my own pet program, talking with people, going to seminars and watching the productions on the huge HD screen. The 4K PC executable session just finished, and some production were awesome.

One of the problem of speaking multiple langages is that sometimes things have parallel meanings. While I have no issue understanding expressions that somehow overlap between langages, I noticed I never use some expressions that somehow sound wrong to me. Here are some examples:

Maker Faire

Faire means to make in French, so this sounds very redundant.

Dressed to kill

Dresser means to train in French, and is mainly used with animals, so this does not sound so nice.

Gifted Children

Gift means poison in German and I don’t like the ideas that people have about gifted children anyways.

In some sense, those expressions are similar to multi-lingual garden path sentences, but with the ambiguity at the langage level instead of the gramatical level. Do you have such expressions yourselves?